T-Mobile continued to post strong growth in the fourth quarter, adding more customers overall than Verizon, Sprint and AT&T. The Bellevue, Wash. company is gaining quickly on Sprint, and growing much faster than all of its rivals in the most coveted category of wireless subscribers — postpaid phone customers.
That’s one takeaway from the latest numbers reported by the major U.S. wireless carriers. With all four companies having now reported their fourth-quarter earnings, here’s a look at GeekWire’s quarterly wireless industry scorecard.
[Note: Verizon’s total subscriber lines in the chart above do not include machine-to-machine connections, which would put Verizon ahead of AT&T with approximately 128 million lines, according to analyst estimates.]
T-Mobile posted total net customer growth of 2.1 million in the quarter, edging out Verizon at 2 million net additions and AT&T at 1.9 million. Sprint trailed the pack with 967,000 net customer additions.
Based on its total subscribers of 55 million, T-Mobile remains the nation’s fourth-largest wireless carrier, although T-Mobile CEO John Legere yesterday questioned Sprint’s count, saying that the company is using an unorthodox method that overstates its total customer count. Sprint, which reports nearly 56 million subscribers, says it’s not doing anything unusual in its numbers, but regardless, T-Mobile is on a pace to surpass Sprint in the first part of this year.
Another important measure to watch is postpaid net phone additions. Analysts and investors look at postpaid growth as a key way to determine a carrier’s health. These customers, who pay at the end of a billing period, typically have better credit than their prepaid peers and are considered more valuable.
T-Mobile also led by this specific measure, adding a net total of 1 million postpaid phone customers in the fourth quarter, compared with 148,000 net postpaid smartphone additions for AT&T; 672,000 net postpaid phone additions for Verizon; and a loss of 205,000 postpaid phone additions for Sprint.
Across all device types, AT&T reported strong overall growth in postpaid customers, adding about 854,000 postpaid subscribers total. However, much of that came not from smartphones but rather from tablets, a less lucrative device category for carriers.
Looking ahead, one big question in 2015 is whether T-Mobile can keep up this pace of growth. The company is targeting additions of 2.2 to 3.2 million postpaid net customers in 2015, which would be down from 4.9 million in 2014.
Although T-Mobile CEO Legere is plotting to overtake Sprint, he also sees the rival as a key part of the competitive landscape. “We’re rooting for Sprint,” said Legere during the company’s conference call yesterday. “We need Sprint to take a few shots at the big guys.”
